Tag Archives: naomi greenaway

The sunshine may be putting a spring in your step, but proceed with caution — the months of June and July are a love danger zone with Facebook seeing more relationship status break downs than any other month.

But fortunately there are ways of keeping your relationship strong, happy and ‘active’. According to a study carried out by psychologist Jo Hemming for lastminute.com, the magic ingredient is spontaneity.

Ditching the routine and introducing regular ‘planned spontaneity’ boosts sexual activity and increases happiness by a full day and a half per week.

Predictability is hard to avoid – trust me, I’ve written over 450 blogs on this website over the years, and predictability is the biggest threat to me continuing. Equally, predictability is a clear threat to the love lives of the nation, with relationships hitting the rocks left right and centre.

It’s not all bad news, of course: by introducing a little spontaneity into your relationship, you can boost sex by 33%. It’s just a shame that the headline doesn’t make it clear if that 33% is in frequency, intensity, speed or simply word length (throwing in a spontaneous extra letter really keeps sjex fresh and surprising).

Most predictably of all, this story extolling the virtues of spontaneity is little more than an advert for a travel website which specialises in last minute travel deals – lastminute.com.

The Daily Mail, here, advancing the hereditary hypothesis of infidelity. However, the source of the statistics ought to offer a pinch of doubt:

The results were revealed in a new poll of 2,000 people who have had affairs by Illicit Encounters, Britain’s biggest extra-marital dating site.

Not only is this story nothing more than a simple advert an online hook-up site, but it features an interesting take on statistics, too: even assuming the results are accurate (and that’s not an assumption we ought to make lightly), what we’ve found isn’t a truism about the general public, as the survey sample included only people who had signed up for a cheating website.

If you only survey people who have elected to join a site like ‘Illicit Encounters’, you haven’t gathered the opinions of those who have offline affairs… or those who have no affairs at all. Thus it’s perfectly possible (and, indeed, likely) that children of cheating parents (male or female) don’t go on to sign up for a help-me-cheat website, and therefore don’t appear in the statistics of this particular PR piece.

Of course, why let the facts get in the way of a good publicity opportunity?